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The following is a study into the understanding of the modularity and visual production pipeline used by many modern major gaming companies, as well as a study of constructing engaging player environments. By using modularity in environment creation, production teams can create levels and environments faster and more efficiently by cutting down overall development time. Modularity and reusable assets can become more obvious to players when exploring the environment when similar meshes and scenes are depicted more than once. The result of this repetition dissolves player immersion and environment credibility. By incorporating key game construction techniques, the altered production pipeline and additions will grant the level designer, environment artists, and overall production team greater capability to break up the static feeling of modular design. As this thesis will demonstrate, by using and combining three specific construction techniques-vertex blending, shader controls, and displacement-the modeler, texture artist, environment artist, and level designer will have more direct control of the final outcome of the environments and levels they can create.
About the author
Clinton Crumpler is currently an environment artist located in Austin, Texas with a primary focus in environment art, shader development, and art direction. Clinton has work at several studios ranging from AAA to mobile games and also has released multiple video tutorial collaborations.
